BRAZIL

   
Letter From Rondônia
Part I: BR - 364
Norman Gall
 

The road known as BR- 364 is the new dirt highway that knifes its way into the jungle from southern Brazil to open western Amazônia to large-scale human settlement. Tens of thousands of people travel along BR-364 each year to seek land as the Brazilian frontier moves across the savannas and jungles of South America’s continental interior, the most rapid and extensive settlement of new lands since the occupation of the western United States a century ago.

From the air, BR-364 looks like a faintly visible surgical incision in the green ocean of the mata. As the road pushes northward and westward through the Federal Territory of Rondônia, an area the size of West Germany that contains some of Amazônia s most fertile soils, BR-364 becomes the principal point of reference for those who must navigate and survive in the jungle. It often is the only place where a small airplane can make an emergency landing amid the incipient clearings of hacked and burned forest that appear through the haze of the jungle’s steaming transpiration. The haze continues over immense distances. Looking westward, it obscures the crests of the Serra dos Parecis, the knoll-like granitic formations that slope gently toward the Guaporé River, the old river route of Portugal’s colonial empire that today forms Brazil’s jungle frontier with Bolivia. The haze deadens man’s vision of river and forest, evoking a deceptive sense of peace.

During the rainy season, from December to April, BR-364 is a bog much of the time. The rains attack so ferociously that the trucks from São Paulo, on which Rondônia’s economy wholly depends, succeed only in miring themselves into a forced halt. During the months of heavy rain, the new settlers’ communities along BR-364 can be cut off for weeks without supplies of flour, salt, sugar, cooking oil, kerosene, and salted fish, all of which must come by truck from southern Brazil. At this time of year, the farmers are working frantically to harvest their rice crops before the heavy winds and rains blow the stalks to the ground and the ripened grains begin germinating again. Rice is planted in October and November, just before the rains begin, so the sprouts will be nourished in their critical first weeks by the nitrogen released by the moisture from the charred remains of the forest. If the ripened rice can be collected before the stalks fall, it can be stored in the fields under plastic sheeting for as much as 40 days. But some farmers cannot wait for the rains to end to sell their crops. "We need money and cannot wait for the road to dry," they told me. "Many of us have to carry sacks of rice on our backs to where the trucks can enter."

In recent years Rondônia has become the cutting edge of the Brazilian frontier. The territory’s population has multiplied tenfold since 1950, increasing from 110,000 to an estimated 350,000 between 1970 and 1976 alone. The migrations into Rondônia, moreover, represent a much broader movement into Brazil’s continental interior that has gathered strength in the course of this century. This movement has involved a quest and struggle for land that has bred conflict throughout the backlands and has pushed hundreds of thousands of Brazil’s rural people to occupy the territory of neighboring republics, crossing the 10,000 miles of border that Brazil shares in the interior of South America with 10 different countries. The demographic and economic pressures on these borderlands is just one facet of Brazil’s emergence as a major geopolitical force in the Western Hemisphere. While Brazil’s rulers ambitiously drive their country toward a more important role in world politics, realization of these ambitions will depend heavily on her capacity to organize and develop her inner frontier, in her own continental heartland, which has taken centuries to penetrate.

In the older frontier areas of the world, one of the main questions was, How far from a railway line can land be settled? In the United States, Argentina, and Australia, crops could be carried by mule or wagon for 10 or 15 miles; in Rhodesia, 25 miles; and in Siberia, somewhat farther than that because of the flatness of the terrain and the low value of the peasants’ time and labor. In Brazil today, the problem is roads, especially feeder roads to reach the farms and colonies being slashed from the jungle. In Rondônia, Brazil’s largest and most dynamic area of government colonization, nearly half the farms are without roads. Colonization officials estimate that an area 30 miles wide on either side of BR-364 can be settled if the feeder roads can be kept open three-fourths of the time, but only 12 miles wide if the roads are open only half the time. They are also learning that it is much more costly to maintain a road in Amazônia than to build one.

During Amazônia’s dry season, less famous but no less formidable than the rains, BR-364 becomes a ribbon of reddish powder, caking the faces of all travelers, especially those who travel northward in the pau de arara, the covered wagons of the Brazilian frontier. The pau de arara are tarpaulin-covered trucks that carry three or four settler families each, together with their household effects and their chickens, pigs, and other household animals. The journey northward to Rondônia may take two weeks in a hired truck. The passengers take turns sitting in the cab next to the driver, bathe in jungle streams, sleep on the ground beneath the truck when it parks for the night, and wait patiently in the shade of nearby trees for mechanical breakdowns to be repaired and the journey to continue. Some of the new settlers are village farmer-merchants from depressed and drought-stricken areas of the states of Espirito Santo and Minas Gerais. They drive their own trucks to Rondônia and load the pau de arara with their relatives, compadres, and peons to help with the brutal work of clearing and burning the forest. Others are small farmers from the southern states of Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul, many of them descendants of Italian and German immigrants who came to Brazil a century ago, some of whom still practice subsistence farming, while others now dream of transforming tens of thousands of acres into cattle ranches. Then there are the land thieves, the grileiros, who perform in a rudimentary way the kind of speculative exercise that has spread like a wild fever on the Brazilian frontier. They move onto somebody’s land, anybody’s land, nobody’s land; the issue of ownership is often confused because boundaries are rarely surveyed in the jungle and land titles frequently are ill-drafted, fraudulent, or redundant; the same property may have been sold many times over in recent years. The rudimentary speculator clears a patch of forest, builds a hut, and sells out within weeks in order to clear and build elsewhere. The purchaser, one of the thousands of new faces arriving weekly on buses and trucks, may find that the same land has been sold by the grileiro to two or more new "owners." The confusion is so great because there are so many people cutting their own trails into the mata, far from the highway, searching the higher elevations for patches of fertile terra roxa volcanic soil beneath the forest.

They come to Rondônia in such numbers that large swaths of the jungle are abolished and new towns arise along BR-364 in a single summer. There is Cacoal, in a part of the jungle where cocoa grows wild, at a widening of the road where there were only five houses in 1972. Today Cacoal has 16,000 people and more are coming. It is the seat of one of the five new municipios, or counties, created in Rondônia by the federal government during 1977. Satellite telephone communications link Cacoal with the rest of Brazil and the outside world. There are as many pharmacies and private clinics as there are bars and restaurants. The town’s mayor, a gray-haired mulatto from Minas Gerais, arrived four years ago to do business. He spends much of his time handing out "occupation permits" for new arrivals to build shacks on municipal land on the outskirts of town. "Cacoal is a baby that was born big," he says proudly. "Today the great ambition of the people of Cacoal is to have our own television station. We are carrying out our own market survey to show that we can pay for it."

The dry season is also the season of the big burn. Large parts of the forest become such a holocaust in August and September that small aircraft cannot fly over portions of western Amazônia because visibility is blocked by the smoke issuing from the great fires started to clear the forest. When the big burn is over, areas of mata look like devastated battlegrounds. The charred and disfigured trunks of great trees are scattered over the blackened earth like victims of an invading army that suddenly has ended an age of primeval security. This is destruction on an epic scale, carried out less by families of settlers than by brigades of peons—drifters, failed pioneers, farmhands expelled from their homes by agricultural mechanization in southern Brazil. The brigades of peons are flown into the jungle by companies based on São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro that seek to take advantage of the huge tax and loan incentives offered by the Brazilian government for clearing the Amazon. The companies arrive in the jungle with airplanes, agronomists, lawyers, political connections, government money, and hired thugs, known as capangas, whose job is to protect disputed land boundaries from invasion by new squatters and to evict families from land claimed by the company. In this way a land boom has developed in the Amazon and throughout the Brazilian frontier. The companies buy, at low prices, large tracts of forest in which some squatters may already be living; they also tend to buy up land from the initial wave of pioneer settlers. Sometimes the squatters are paid to leave. Sometimes their houses are burned by the capangas and their subsistence plots sown with pasture grass from overflying company planes to stop the squatters from growing more food. Sometimes the capangas maim or kill recalcitrant squatters, and sometimes the squatters wait in ambush for the capangas and successfully resist eviction. Conflict and violence have quickly become legendary in these regions. Many Brazilians explain that "this is our Wild West," comparing the new towns of the Brazilian frontier in the 1970s with the new Kansas cattle towns of the 1870s.

The seed-bearing people who migrate to Rondônia along BR-364 could play a historic role as they invade the rain forest. Bringing hatchets, hoes, and digging sticks, the land-hungry settlers from southern Brazil represent a culture that is alien and antagonistic to the tropical forest, perhaps the most complex of the world’s major ecosystems. They are trying to replace parts of the forest with a simpler and more nourishing ecosystem of their own, capable of supporting intensive human settlement, based on a protein-rich seed culture of corn and beans and rice.

The invaders thus are challenging an ancient dichotomy of the tropical world. Over the roughly 22,000 years in which mankind has left detectable traces of its presence in the New World, a clear distinction has evolved between the two great zones of cultivation: one of these areas is the humid lowlands of northern South America, where agriculture was developed by planting parts of existing plants—such as manioc and yams— rather than seeds. This vegeculture spread northward into the Caribbean and southward into Amazônia, providing starch for the diet of a small and dispersed population that lived principally by gathering fruits from the forest and fish and water mammals from the rivers. The second great zone grew from the seed agriculture—mainly corn, squash, and beans—that sustained the dense Indian populations of Middle America with a protein supply produced by themselves. A classical pattern of subsistence seed culture developed which survives today in Middle America. The three crops occupy the same plot of land, with the beans climbing the corn stalks and the squash spreading over the ground, together effectively using sunlight and rain and protecting the soil against erosion. Throughout the world, seed culture has shown a powerful tendency to expand. In tropical Southeast Asia, rice replaced yam and taro culture over a wide area, while in prehistoric West Africa the yam appears to have ceded ground to cereal grains developed north of the Congo basin. The present inhabitants of the west and central African rain forest invaded the region more than 1,500 years ago, bringing with them early agriculture and some iron tools. By contrast, the Amazon Indian is the decimated survivor of the original inhabitants, gathering his food in the forest and the rivers and planting manioc and sweet potato. Throughout the Brazilian frontier, and especially along the road to Rondônia, the indigenous population is being replaced by invaders armed with new technologies of penetration. The settlers desperately are trying to transmit the seed culture of more temperate areas into the tropical forest and savanna on a scale and with a speed never before attempted. The great question they face is whether the frontier strategy is feasible, economically and ecologically.

In their struggle to harvest rice in the rains, the new settlers of Rondônia have learned that seed culture in the equatorial forest involves major difficulties. For one thing, while root crops in Amazônia can stay in the ground until they are needed, harvesting seed crops in the wet tropics and protecting them against moisture is a very tricky business. Also, protein-rich grains remove nutrients from the soil much more rapidly than starchy root crops. They also demand clearings more exposed to sunlight and rain, thus posing greater dangers of soil erosion. In response to this challenge, the settlers are improvising mixed cropping techniques similar to those of the ancient seed cultivators of Middle America. They are intercropping their rice, beans, and corn with maniac plantings, giving the soil a hardy, leafy cover that lasts through drought and rains. At government urging, moreover, they are planting permanent crops such as cocoa, rubber, and bananas, which give year-round cover to and extract fewer nutrients from the soil.

But there is a larger resource problem that the settlers must overcome. Except for islands of fertility, such as the swaths of volcanic terra roxa in Rondônia, the soils beneath the rain forest are poor. About 70 percent of Amazônia is covered by lateritic soils. These acidic soils are very deficient in organic matter and rich in iron and aluminum, which may turn into a bricklike substance (laterite) when deforested and exposed to sunlight. In the Rio Negro region of Amazônia and in the Guianas, extensive forests grow on white sands where even the iron oxides have been leached out. The growth of luxuriant vegetation on these barren soils, with trees rising to heights of more than 100 feet, is possible because of the intense and efficient recycling within the ecosystem of the limited amounts of nutrients available to it, through rainwater and the interaction of myriad species of flora and fauna. A large proportion of the nutrients are stored in the bodies of plants and animals and are recycled rapidly in the decomposition of dead organisms. South America, as a whole, is notably poor in large game animals to sustain a colonizing population. The wildlife of Amazônia is said to be poorer in volume than that of the rain forests of Africa and Asia. One area of central Amazônia was found to contain about 440 metric tons of plant matter per acre and only 0.08 tons of animal biomass, principally invertebrates and insects, with most of them living inside the soil. It still is not known whether this ecosystem, once destroyed, can be replaced by another capable of producing enough protein to sustain large-scale human settlement.

The northward and westward push of the Brazilian frontier thus embodies some of the most important technical and ecological challenges of the late twentieth century. At the same time, the exploration and conquest of the virgin resource base of the South American interior may help determine the degree of abundance or scarcity that mankind must face in the next century and beyond. They may also help to answer questions like these: Will distance continue to diminish as an obstacle to the settlement of remote areas of the earth? Or will new frontiers be abolished by the new price of oil? Can the islands of soil fertility beneath the earth’s tropical forests, one of mankind’s last spatial frontiers, be husbanded with new technologies and ecological discipline to sustain populations far larger than the tribes that have traditionally inhabited the Amazon? Or will these new agricultural settlements be wiped out quickly by disease and soil erosion? Will the occasional swaths of fertile soils in the "green desert," stripped of their forest cover, be washed away by the Amazon’s rains? In other words, will the burning of the forests turn the green desert into a red desert, a monument to mankind’s destructiveness, or is it posing a challenge that can be met by innovation and adaptation?

In the past, questions like these have been answered by either dogma or perplexity. At the beginning of this century, the military engineer Euclydes da Cunha, Brazil’s greatest writer, made his way through the Amazon rubber boom and wrote of the prevailing urge to "return as soon as possible, fleeing that swampy and melancholy land that seems to lack enough solidity to support the material weight of a society." That view is supported by the contention of many academicians that the Amazon forest is an extremely fragile ecosystem that will be quickly destroyed by large-scale human penetration and settlement, that after this rapacious and pitiless folly runs its course, only a continental wasteland will remain. On the other hand, the generals and technocrats of Brazil’s military regime, which launched the intensive Amazon settlement in 1970, tend to believe that the Amazon is a cornucopia of natural resources that must be developed, lest it be wrested away in the future by some foreign power. They see the more fertile parts of Amazônia being inhabited by agricultural settlements, while the much greater area of poor lateritic soils would be used as pasture for one of the world’s largest cattle industries. A third view, one of greater humility and perplexity, was voiced by the French geographer Pierre Gourou in his probings into the question of why Amazônia was inhabited by less than one person per square mile at mid-century:

Although Brazil tripled the size of her territory in the westward expansion of her legally recognized boundaries that began in the mid-eighteenth century, three-fourths of her people still are concentrated near the Atlantic coast. They live east of a north-south line, running from the city of Belém at the mouth of the Amazon River to a point just west of the megalopolis of Sãoo Paulo, that was drawn in 1494, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, to separate the Spanish and Portuguese empires in America. Only with the rapid diffusion of technology in the twentieth century have the Brazilian people begun to occupy their western backlands and to change their settlement patterns significantly.

The push of the Brazilian frontier into the continental interior reflects some extraordinary transformations during the twentieth century. First, a sustained demographic expansion is occurring that is without precedent in human experience. In 1900 Brazil had only 17 million people, and her main economic problem was said to be a manpower shortage. By 1972, however, Brazil’s population had passed the 100-million mark and, according to United Nations projections, will reach 212 million by the year 2000. Between 1950 and 1970, the Amazon’s population doubled, after remaining stagnant since the collapse of the rubber boom on the eve of World War I. History provides no clear precedent for Brazil’s demographic increase on this scale, save for the United States in the nineteenth century, where immigration played a much larger role. Second, this population increase was supported by the extraordinary growth of Brazil’s gross national product (GNP), expanding at an average annual rate of 6.1 percent over the past half century. Third, Brazil’s land area in crops increased from 16 million acres in 1920 to about 90 million acres in 1970, one of the world’s highest rates of cropland expansion. Between 1950 and 1970, the number of farms in the Amazon more than tripled and is increasing at a much higher rate during the 1970s. Fourth, this cropland expansion was made possible by an enormous road-building effort in Brazil’s undeveloped interior that multiplied the highway network tenfold since 1945. This effort’s most spectacular achievements were the new roads that crisscross the Amazon Basin: the Belém-Brasília highway, the first land route between southern Brazil and the Amazon River, completed in the late 1950s; the opening of BR-364 in the mid-1960s linking the new heartland capital of Brasilia with the western Amazon and piercing the jungles of Mato Grosso and Rondônia as far north as the rubber-rich state of Acre, wrested from neighboring

Bolivia early in this century; beginning construction of the Transamazon and Northern Perimeter highways in the 1970s, aimed at linking the Atlantic with Brazil’s western frontiers and creating paths of settlement in the equatorial forest that would relieve the chronic poverty, overpopulation, and social tensions of Brazil’s most depressed region, the Northeast. The generals and technocrats who rule Brazil envision these roads as strategic links in a great continental highway network that will connect southern Brazil’s industrial centers with the Caribbean to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the west. In this way Brazil was attempting to build a continental civilization around the truck and the automobile, despite her inability to provide more than one-fifth of her petroleum needs from her own resources. While Brazil today is the world’s fifth largest country in area and the sixth largest in population, no other continental nation is so deficient in economically useful deposits of fossil fuels. However, thanks to the low cost of imported oil and the rapid diffusion of technology during the postwar period, Brazil in recent decades has become the first large country in history to rely almost entirely on the internal combustion engine to develop her economy and tie together her territory.

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